On most jobs, piping drafting is not a matter of a few special sheets but of volume. A piping layout consists largely of components that follow one another, in sizes that keep recurring, across series of sheets that look very much alike. That is exactly where a drawing office gets stuck.
The work is not difficult, there is just a lot of it, and it has to stay consistent from sheet one to sheet two hundred. We take that volume off the hands of companies that do not have enough drafting capacity of their own.
We draft and model and do not do engineering, so calculations on a system stay with the party appointed for them. Our contribution lies in the drafting, the pace and the consistency. The team is already in place and scales with what a project requires. The work is done entirely remotely from our own office, with our own licences and following the drawing conventions the client provides. We reply to an incoming enquiry within 1 to 2 working days.
Cable tray routing in the model, built with parametric families that carry the material schedule with them.
What piping drafting costs and how we record hours
We charge by the hour or per project at a fixed price. Which option fits is decided together, and it depends mainly on how clearly the package can be defined in advance. A clearly described series of schematic sheets with a fixed pattern lends itself to a fixed project price, because the scope can be estimated reasonably well up front. Work that is still changing shape along the way, for example because the routing is still shifting, is fairer on an hourly basis. In both cases, we only bill genuine working hours.
If a drafter steps away for five minutes for a coffee, the time recording stops. That may sound petty, but with high-volume piping drafting it adds up over a long run of weeks, and the client needs to be able to trust that an hour billed is an hour drafted. We do not use prepaid hour bundles or a monthly hours subscription, so nothing keeps running once the work is finished. In practice, what brings costs down most is not negotiation but preparation. Material that is legible and complete saves a clean-up round at the start.
Established CAD standards prevent correction rounds afterwards. And the biggest effect comes from reuse. Components that recur a hundred times, we build properly once instead of drawing them a hundred times. We only prepare an estimate after we have seen the material, because an estimate without source files is mostly a guess. In the first conversation, we go through the package and indicate which way of charging makes the most sense for it.
Scaling up when the piping work piles up
The trigger is the same for almost all our clients. There is too little time, too few drafters, or a peak the in-house team cannot take on without letting current work slide. With our large, flexible team of drafters, we scale up or down for each project. That is not a promise we have to fulfil afterwards by finding people, because the team is already in place. We deploy what the project requires, and when it is urgent, we add people straight away.
Everyone who drafts for us has more than ten years of CAD experience, and the core of the team has around twenty-five years combined. As a result, the onboarding is about the project, not the profession. In piping drafting, that difference is noticeable, because an experienced drafter recognises the logic of a layout and does not treat every connection as a new problem. If someone drops out due to illness or holidays, someone else steps in so the work does not stop. The client pays no ongoing salary costs and does not have to keep a drafting seat for a peak that will be over in three months.
For us, scaling up also means scaling down. If the volume drops, we take people off the project without any notice period attached. During a deadline that could not slip, we worked evenings and weekends, with days of fourteen to fifteen hours, to deliver on time. Work even continued during a holiday that Sam, our team leader, had already planned. We do not plan for that kind of effort, but it has happened and it worked.
No ongoing payroll costs and no idle staff once the peak is over. If one of our people is off sick or on holiday, we replace them and the work simply carries on.
From first conversation to partial delivery
The project starts with a conversation. In it, we go through what is there, what needs to be done and by when. From the client, we receive the details and usually also the existing drawings that need revising. We look through that material before putting a drafter to work, because the quality of the source determines how best to set up the work. That first review produces an inventory of what repeats, what deviates and what is missing. We present that inventory in one go, bundled, rather than as a series of separate questions that fragment a project lead's week. We then start on a first block. We deliver that block early, even if it is not yet finished in the sense of complete, because a wrong assumption about layers or sheet layout is cheap in block one and expensive in block six.
We gather the feedback, process the changes and pick up the next section. The project continues in steps like this until the set is complete. The meeting rhythm varies by client. For work with a tight schedule, there are two days between meetings. For calmer work, a weekly slot is enough. Files are exchanged by email, and on larger projects through an environment the client can log into themselves. For day-to-day contact, we use email, phone and meetings, and we either drive to the client or welcome them at our office. Within 1 to 2 working days, we let you know how we view a new enquiry.
Who we do piping drafting for
We draft for engineering firms, architectural practices, contractors and manufacturers, and more broadly for companies with technical drafting work. The people we talk to are managers, team leads and owners, people responsible for the schedule who can see that their own team is not going to make it. The problem they bring to us is almost never a technical one.
They know exactly how it should be drawn; they just do not have the hands. We see this most clearly in greenhouse construction. Companies in that field often work in AutoCAD, and AutoCAD is not clever at building components such as valves in piping systems. If you need a valve in 90 and in 110, you draw it by hand every single time.
With a parametric Revit family, a component like that is placed in a single action, adapts to a different size and the material schedule updates automatically. In work like this, that saves at least seventy per cent of the time. That is exactly the calculation that sticks with a team lead. For companies where piping drafting is a regular part of production, the gain therefore lies in preparing components, not in working harder.
With clients like these, we usually come in on a peak and then often stay on for the repetitive part, because that is the part that eats up the most time in-house and is the least enjoyable. Our clients are in the Netherlands, and that is the market we focus on. We started this last year at a client's request, and it has been a standard service in our offering ever since.
Frequently asked questions about piping drafting
Hand your piping drafting over to us
Send us your documents and drawing conventions and we will let you know within one to two working days what we can take on and when.